Adriana N. Helbig: Hip-Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration (2014)

15 May 2022, dusan

“In Hip Hop Ukraine, we enter a world of urban music and dance competitions, hip hop parties, and recording studio culture to explore unique sites of interracial encounters among African students, African immigrants, and local populations in eastern Ukraine. Adriana N. Helbig combines ethnographic research with music, media, and policy analysis to examine how localized forms of hip hop create social and political spaces where an interracial youth culture can speak to issues of human rights and racial equality. She maps the complex trajectories of musical influence—African, Soviet, American—to show how hip hop has become a site of social protest in post-socialist society and a vehicle for social change.”

Publisher Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 2014
ISBN 9780253012043, 025301204X
xix+233 pages

Interview with author: Amanda Jeanne Swain (New Books Network, 2014, podcast).
Reviews: Kevin C. Holt (Current Musicology, 2014), Michael C. Thornton (Slavonic and East European Review, 2015), Mark Alan Rhodes II (Social & Cultural Geography, 2015), Anna Oldfield (Popular Music and Society, 2015), Tony Mitchell (Slavic Review, 2016), Kendra Salois (Ethnomusicology, 2017).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF
Multimedia companion

Alex Zamalin: Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism (2019)

14 January 2021, dusan

“Within the history of African American struggle against racist oppression that often verges on dystopia, a hidden tradition has depicted a transfigured world. Daring to speculate on a future beyond white supremacy, black utopian artists and thinkers offer powerful visions of ways of being that are built on radical concepts of justice and freedom. They imagine a new black citizen who would inhabit a world that soars above all existing notions of the possible.

In Black Utopia, Alex Zamalin offers a groundbreaking examination of African American visions of social transformation and their counterutopian counterparts. Considering figures associated with racial separatism, postracialism, anticolonialism, Pan-Africanism, and Afrofuturism, he argues that the black utopian tradition continues to challenge American political thought and culture. Black Utopia spans black nationalist visions of an ideal Africa, the fiction of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Sun Ra’s cosmic mythology of alien abduction. Zamalin casts Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler as political theorists and reflects on the antiutopian challenges of George S. Schuyler and Richard Wright. Their thought proves that utopianism, rather than being politically immature or dangerous, can invigorate political imagination. Both an inspiring intellectual history and a critique of present power relations, this book suggests that, with democracy under siege across the globe, the black utopian tradition may be our best hope for combating injustice.”

Publisher Columbia University Press, New York, 2019
ISBN 9780231187404, 0231187408
x+182 pages

Reviews: Smaran Dayal (Social Text, 2020), David A. Lemke (Utopian Studies, 2020), Francis Shor (J American History, 2020), Ladee Hubbard (TLS, 2019).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF

Alan Read (ed.): The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation (1996)

2 August 2020, dusan

“Creating a far-reaching and original dialogue between cultural theory and visual practice, the rich insights which emerge from this publication explain why Frantz Fanon’s seminal texts of the 1950s and 60s – Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth – have re-emerged at the forefront of postcolonial studies.

This collection of texts and dialogues work with Fanon’s ideas in understanding how narrative, the media, image, and symbol lie at the very heart of the practice of politics and social knowledge.

Originating from the symposium Working with Fanon held during the season Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire (ICA, London, 1995).”

Contributors: Martina Attille, Homi K. Bhabha, Renée Green, Stuart Hall, Lyle Ashton Harris, bell hooks, Isaac Julien, Marc Latamie, Steve McQueen, Kobena Mercer, Mark Nash, Raoul Peck, Alan Read, Ntozake Shange, Gilane Tawadros, Françoise Vergès, Lola Young.

Publisher ICA, London, in association with Iniva, London, and Bay Press, Seattle, 1996
ISBN 1900300028, 9781900300025
211 pages

Reviews: David Macey (Radical Philosophy, 1997), Julian Samuel (Race & Class, 1997), D. Soyini Madison (Signs, 1999).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (3 MB)